Macromedia got freehand when Adobe acquired Aldus - freehand was licensed to Aldus (then to Macromedia) by Altsys - the original creators of freehand. I would suspect that unless macromedia own freehand outright that ownership of freehand would revert to Altsys (if they still exist)
Can't see Adobe stopping Illustrator in favour of Freehand - just would not happen

Adobe will have to divest itself of one or the other products that match. There will probably be some company picking up the pieces somewhere. Both Macromedia and Adobe has 'mac' issues (coldfusion and competition from Apple for some of their products). Personally, I think freehand kills illustrator, but w/ indesign + illustrator they could possibly make freehand into some kind of 'pagemaker' app. Golive is for ease, Dreamweaver is for pros; although both are too similar to keep. Fireworks rocks. Remember the 'imageready' fiasco? Adobe isn't good w/ that type of stuff. Flash seems to be the major driving force behind this acquisition. Adobe has nothing there. As far as training is concerned, Macromedia trials and the help system kill anything Adobe has. I hope somehow this one gets blocked because AFAIC this is bad for me and competition.

Man, I go away for the weekend, and the the whole world turns upside down!

monopoly

I am almost positive that not too long ago this headline WAS an April Fool's joke on some website.

Adobe will have bought a company that owns Freehand. The first time was in the Clinton admin; this time, under Bush, there probably will be no concern over the monopolistic situation. Adobe will be given full blessing to do what they want. It is too late now for some other company to enter the fray with Freehand - it is going to die. Microsoft won't want it, Corel won't want it... hmmm, maybe Apple???

Well this can't be good!

I wonder why this was agreed upon. The competition between these two giants was healthy for both companies and consumers. Now we'll have a vacuum of competition in this area. Can and will anyone else step up to the plate now?

Just as Adobe sold off Freehand and Fontographer when it bought Aldus, i suspect they'll keep what makes sense to fold into their product portfolio (Flash, Director, some form of Dreamweaver) and then sell off the rest.

But is there another big enough player in that space who would want to scoop up those assets and start competing with the 800-lb. gorilla known as Adobe?

What a shock!
I use Freehand over Illustrator and wonder what will happen to it.

I'm sure the government won't give a damn about this new monopoly.

If there's a problem, Adobe should use some kind of christian mumbo jumbo to deflect criticism. Hey, if it works for Bush and some of the wackos in Congress (DeLay, Frist, etc.), why not.

After all, there's no such thing as evolution, either. This is a case of pure predation.

...combine Illustrator and Freehand and rename it Frustrator!

Hahahaha LOL, that's teh funnay man! :D

was Macromedia in some sort of financial trouble? poor cash flow?

I agree, a troublesome merger for creative individuals. A little less competition -- well, there really wasn't any major competition to Adobe other than Macromedia.

It will take a couple years for any software "synergies" to be realized. Remember the Dreamweaver, UltraDev and then Drumbeat2000 aquisition & evolution.

Hopefully elements of Fireworks can live on, GoLive can finally be put to rest, and if they finally kill off Director, they give Flash the ability to make cross platform, stand alone projetors (.exe files)

Adobe could never get a foothold in the web publication space, so this is their second chance to get it right.

at least this might put an end to the silly "flash paper"idea. In the end, it probably will ease things since the will combine functionality into one player for end users. Still, I'd hate to see fireworks go away. I always touted Fireworks as a cheap alternative to Photoshop with more functionality than Elements.

What I'm most concerned with is Macromedia Breeze and Flash Server. Enterprise level functionality is not something that Adobe seemed eager to pursue at all, so it worrys me.

Also, while it is posted on Adobe's website, I've not seen anything on this on any other sites (MacNN has been fooled before), though it's still early.

Ok, here's my predictions:

Dreamweaver/GoLive: Come on, GoLive is done. Any merits aside (I hate DW MX 2004 for it's bugginess and instability), Dreamweaver has like 80% or greater marketshare with serious web designers.

Illustrator/Freehand: Again, merits aside... goodbye Freehand, although I expect it will be sold to another company.

Fontographer: Contrary to an earlier post, this is still owned by Macromedia. I wish adobe would update it (carbon? hello? OSX is like 5 years old now!), make it able to edit Opentype fonts, and generally make it modern again.

Unfortunately, I believe Adobe would rather people couldn't make their own fonts... call me crazy, but I get that feeling.

Director: Will continue as planned, perhaps receiving even less attention from Adobe.

Flash: No brainer--Flash is probably 50% of the reason Adobe bought MM in the first place (dreamweaver is the other). Flash will continue, now with Acrobat functionality! (goodbye Flashpaper)

Fireworks/Image Ready: ImageReady deserves a painful re-integration with Photoshop (I mean, come on... besides the timeline for making animated gifs, name one feature of imageReady missing in Photoshop)

I would love to see some of fireworks integrated into Photoshop, but I'm not holding my breath.

Cold Fusion: Hrrrrm. Hmmm. They'll sell it. Adobe has no clue what to do with enterprise/server software, and I suspect they know it.

Contribute: Essentially part of Dreamweaver. I expect this app to continue until people realize it's blogging software that charges (too much) per author with none of the hassle of the multiple benefits of using real blogging software.

Flex, Captivate, Authorware, RoboHelp (snicker), Central, Breeze: I could be wrong, but I think Adobe would have little interest in any of these applications... some of them (Flex, Captivate, Central & Breeze) I could see being spun off into a separate company owned by Adobe.

Authorware will probably be sold or killed. Robohelp will be sold, I am almost positive.

Flash ComServer/JRun: Hard to say (see ColdFusion). Perhaps the server applications will be spun off into yet another company, owned by Adobe. It seems dangerous to separate Flash and Flash ComServer development, so maybe not.

Web Publishing System: Does this product exist? Did anyone buy it?

So there's my predictions. =)

This can't be happening... Macromedia's support for mac sucked as it was, and now it can only get worse.

If you thought MM was MS's B*****, then this will make that look like it was non-existent.

Curses.

I am reading lots of posts here talking about dreamweaver, freehand, flash, coldfusion.

People, Adobe creates amazing software. Adobe Photoshop WOW, did you see the updates to this app.

Golive and dreamweaver. I used to use dreamweaver, because it was the standard in web develeopment. Try the Golive CS Versions. Support for php, where the php is actually good, and the html and css. Dreamweaver can't even come close to proper code for this. Coldfusion is something they cont to push, I only hope Adobe trashes it.
And btw, the new golive cs 2, supports css even better.

There was a comment that talked about how Adobe is only good becuase they buy up companys. What do you think Macromedia has been doing. All of there software, is so buggie and pretty much useless on the mac. And on the windows side, its just to darn too slow to use.

Any how, Adobe can help those products become better. And I can only hope that all there products like the flash player, will be bug free or close to it.

Can anyone see "monopoly" coming from a mile away?

I hope the trade commission (or what ever government body has to approve this merger) says, "Wait a Minute... Not so fast!"!

This is NOT good!

If you have never used ColdFusion, you have NO idea how amazing it is. Fast, powerful, feature-rich, and stable. I can code a website quickly and easily, hook it into Oracle data in seconds...LOVE IT.

I hope it either stays or is sold to someone who will continue to nurture its development.

TK

This is scary to me. I love photoshop (who doesn't really), but I use fireworks more these days for quick mockups and comping, it's so intuitive and easy. ImageReady blows chunks IMO (as does golive - which I hopes GoesDead). I was a freehand nerd for years, and I still think it's the easier of the two, but I've started using illustrator more and more. But for me, Fireworks is like gold...

so will they make flash suck less? (cause I don't think they could make it suck more...)

Adobe has been moving away from the Mac platform in recent years. They have also recommended their customers move to the PC platform for best performance. I see this move as nothing but bad for the Mac platform.

So I might stsrt to use Flash!
I always thought that Macromedia work-around was so un-easy/user friendly...

If Adobe were forced to divest of Freehand for antitrust reasons, who has the size and syngeristic products to take Freehand on?

Quark.

Imagine Freehand as a companion product or its features folded into Quark Xpress.

Macromedia has always been a two-bit company anyway. This is like the third time they were going out of business.

Hopefully Adobe will just go ahead kill off Freehand and Dreamweaver! ;)

Macromedia had become a very Windows oriented company over the past so many years.

As much as I love Macromedia products, their programs are always buggy -- I mean, always, have quirky, inconsistent interfaces, and the most close-minded (from SF of all places) design. I say, “hooray.” Adobe ain't no angel either, but at least they deliver consistency.

...

I work for a busy NYC printer, and we never get Freehand files in. So for all you people who say you use it, I don't see it! Every vector file we get is in Illustrator format. About twice a year I see some Freehand Generated EPS files. So Adobe is not going to continue Freehand in favor of Illustrator. Maybe they will integrate some of FH's features, but for the most part AI is the more complete program anyway.

I think about the only good program from Macromedia is Flash. Personally I hate Dreamweaver, so I couldn't care less what they do with that! Windows uses love Macromedia stuff, probably because the interface is so bad!

Adobe is going to s**** it all up.....again.
2 Cents.

Macromedia.....

Maybe the folks from FreeHand can show the folks at Illustrator how to make their program work better with Photoshop. I never understood why FreeHand worked better with Photoshop than Illustrator. I guess Macromedia knows more about PostScript than Adobe who created it. My guess is that Adobe will take the best parts of FreeHand and make another stand alone program. Kind of like when they took away some of Illustrator's functionality and made InDesign.

This doesn't sound good for education. Macromedia has a much better site licensing program for schools - for $500, you can license their whole multimedia suite for an entire school. For Adobe, that $500 gets you four licenses for one of their core products. Bummer.

That may save me some cash, if I knew which programs were going to be left to rot.. Here I am ready to upgrade some hardware and get the lastest Adobe and MM apps, and this happens.

I wonder how low sales will dip in the next few months while users wait and see what Adobe$oft is going to do. Hmm, when their stock drops 50% after they report earnings next qtr (costs of the aquistion and low sales due to us wait and sees) I may actually be able to afford to buy some Adobe stock.

Besides that, this sucks and blows.

... to be losing what over the years has proven to be a very productive competition.

But at the same time, I'm excited at the prospect of Adobe updating the Dreamweaver interface to be a little less maddening.

As a web master and instructor who teaches a web design class using Fireworks and Dreamweaver, this is not exactly delightful news! While I use both Adobe and Macromedia products, Macromedia rules for web stuff! GoLive has a great interface, but I don't like the way it builds code. I love Freehand for its speed!

Ay yi yi!

;-0

The people who posted that Adobe is a monopoly - what are you talking about? The last time I checked, there were other illustration and web authoring programs out there... Stone Studio, Canvas, etc. - h***, even QuarkXpress has a great WYSIWYG web tool. Competition exists, albeit lame, so there is no monopoly.

Dreamwever isn't going to go anywhere, just about everybody who does HTML coding uses it. Adobe would have to be real arrogant to roll it in to GoLive, a wholesale change to a 'Golive' style interface and workflow would just alienate it's large userbase. They could incorporate all the good parts in to it though, the Photoshop 'integration' is very cool, and the multiple 'site map' files always struck me as a better idea than DW's monolithic single combined site library.

Maybe Quark will make another offer to buy Adobe now.

maybe Adobe will buy Quark now :P

Imageman obviously hasn't used Dreamweaver for a while. I went the opposite direction, starting with Adobe Pagemill, moving to GoLive when it was by Cyberstudio, and then switching to Dreamweaver in the end. The latest two versions of Dreamweaver have created very clean optimized XHTML, while GoLive is stuck in the non-CSS HTML era with so much extraneous code that it is incomprehensible to the naked eye and produces pages that look different on every different machine.

I may also be similarly outdated in my assessment if Adobe has cleaned up its act since then, because I haven't bothered to use the latest version of GoLive despite owning it.

In short, Dreamweaver produces W3C-compliant code, whereas the last version of GoLive that I've ever used produced code that looked like the source code of some software application rather than (X)HTML or of some JPEG image in a wordprocessor.

Bill Gates will just buy Avid, there will be ten huge American corporations: Mc Donalds Microsoft Wal-Mart The Republican Party Exxon Kraft Philip Morris Monsanto Ford Motors The Catholic Church NASCAR

Isn't this great for competition? Wow.. I love consolidation.

Gotta agree with Xiaopangzi, Dreamweaver produces VERY clean code as compared to Golive.

Maybe they'll keep the 2 products separate...at least for a while.

I guess i'm one of the few who doesn't see this as the monster in the closet, perhaps because I'm rather ambivalent about what apps I use, as long as they _work_. That said, here's my predictions in 2 cents or less:

SVG is dead. Dead like .gimp files aren't a real format. Against an swf/pdf type format, SVG isn't mature or flexible enough to survive Macrodobe may actually ship a version of Flash that's relatively less buggy, and doesn't crash every 10 minutes. As has been mentioned, goodbye Fireworks, Golive, Imageready, and freehand. For the most part, good riddance. Actionscript. My jury's still out on this one. I'd like to say that AS will still advance as a language, but we'll see. Adobe definetly doesn't have strength in code. Real drop shadows in flash. Look for this to be everywhere on the web for six months after the combined version of flash is released Flash .fla importing into Photoshop. Thank god. Both flash and photoshop will continue to lack even a basic spellchecker. I'd love to see integrated workflows between Flash and PS, but time will tell if this is a reality. How Flash and Illustrator mesh also remains to be seen UI: Adobe. Adobe apps are consistenly more polished and usable. Those factions (should) win in case of an application merger. Rise of video. GoLive+Flash+Mobile devices. See other random bobbleheads for rambling on this topic Scriptable macromedia apps. This will be a big boon, should it happen, and should it not be overshadowed by Automator on Mac OS 10.4

Once more, with feeling, and without a bulleted list:

I guess i'm one of the few who doesn't see this as the monster in the closet, perhaps because I'm rather ambivalent about what apps I use, as long as they _work_. That said, here's my predictions in 2 cents or less:

SVG is dead. Dead like .gimp files aren't a real format. Against an swf/pdf type format, SVG isn't mature or flexible enough to survive.

Macrodobe may actually ship a version of Flash or Dreamweaver that's relatively less buggy, and doesn't crash every 10 minutes.

As has been mentioned, goodbye Fireworks, Golive, Imageready, and Freehand. For the most part, good riddance.

Actionscript. My jury's still out on this one. I'd like to say that AS will still advance as a language, but we'll see. Adobe definetly doesn't have strength in code.

Real drop shadows in flash. Look for this to be everywhere on the web for six months after the combined version of flash is released.

Flash .fla importing into Photoshop. Thank god.

Both flash and photoshop will continue to lack even a basic spellchecker.

I'd love to see integrated workflows between Flash and PS, but time will tell if this is a reality.

How Flash and Illustrator mesh also remains to be seen.

UI: Adobe. Adobe apps are consistenly more polished and usable. Those factions (should) win in case of an application merger.

Rise of video. GoLive+Flash+Mobile devices. See other random bobbleheads for rambling on this topic.

Scriptable macromedia apps. This will be a big boon, should it happen, and should it not be overshadowed by Automator on MacOS 10.4.

Why shouldn't apple buy adobe now? They have the cash for it. In one stroke, they would own the entire creative software portfolio, and could leverage the the vertical monopoly into a very powerful position. Am i missing something?

I'd love for adobe to bring out a "flash" in adobe...live motion X...

Funny how the "M" word as pertains to Adobe's success is a negative and as pertains to Apple's is a positive around here.

Imageman obviously hasn't used Dreamweaver for a while. I went the opposite direction, starting with Adobe Pagemill, moving to GoLive when it was by Cyberstudio, and then switching to Dreamweaver in the end. The latest two versions of Dreamweaver have created very clean optimized XHTML, while GoLive is stuck in the non-CSS HTML era with so much extraneous code that it is incomprehensible to the naked eye and produces pages that look different on every different machine.

It sounds like someone likes using a buggie application, and seems to forget how often macromedia apps crash. I used Dreamweaver everday for years, up in till the point when working on a major project and the dam thing crashed without noticed, where I lost everything I was working on. The css in dreamweaver is so slow, its in a menu formate, in Golive you see your styles in a window of its own. When you rollover the name of a css tag, it shows you the look. Its way better and easer to use.

And the code, don't even get me going. I tested a site using dreamweaver and golive. The dreamweaver code, made the page look completly wrong in most browsers. While testing the other page with golive, the pages where bang on. And try writing PHP code in dreamweaver, it completly sucks. Go out and try Golive CS, and use it everday for a week, and you will quickly see how amazing it really is.

And When I started building web sites, I used PageMill, then Golive, Cyber Studios, then I jumped over to Drumbeat, then Dreamweaver. And stayed up untill it crashed way to many times. And when I lost hours and hours of work. Now don't get me wrong, Golive from time to time seems to be slow, but not to the point of it crashing all the time. I can't remeber when thr app crashed. Golive is way better, and it can only get better. I hope they grab something from dreamweaver and bring it over to Golive.

Reasons to look forward to the Adobe buyout:

http://www.nealgardner.com/2005/04/adobe-to-acquire-macromedia-for-34.html

Well, I'm not sure how this will fall out either. Especially for the Mac platform. I would like to see Coldfusion for Mac and smart object in Dreamweaver would be awesome.

Someone mentioned this is a bad deal for education. This is true, Macromedia had a great educational licensing program.

Hi, I have seen some posts of whether or not the FTC would block the deal. Even though I saw somebody saying that we have a lot of competition like Canvas and others, the answer will only come if the market share for each product they have in overlap are known... So, does somebody know here what are the mkt shares for the following products? Illustrator - Freehand Dreamweaver - GoLive Fireworks - Photoshop I am poor shareholder of Macromedia having a hard time to figure this out... any info abt association or where I can find some data will be really helpful Thanks a lot